Wednesday, January 23, 2013

What's the best search tool for finding the most relevant case law on some legal topic? WestlawNext and LexisAdvance both claim to allow searchers to quickly locate the most relevant content with simplified Google-like search boxes, and Google Scholar also searches cases. So I decided to compare the relevance sorting for the three products using some basic searches for patent law topics (i.e., without using tools such as SY,DI() or ATLEAST). In general, I found that WestlawNext did the best job pulling up the most relevant cases—but if you really know nothing about a topic, you are still probably better off starting with treatises and other secondary sources (e.g., for patents, start with Lexis's Chisum treatise). (For more on doing patent research, see my page on patent references.)

Tuesday, January 22, 2013

Unpatentable Drugs and the Standards of Patentability, by Ben Roin (Harvard Law), is older than most articles I blog about (published in 2009), though too young to be a classic. But in rereading it for an article I'm working on, I decided it is worth a quick post, especially for those who missed it when it first came out. Roin's basic claim is simple but important: "the standards by which drugs are deemed unpatentable under the novelty and nonobviousness requirements bear little relationship to the social value of those drugs or the need for a patent to motivate their development."

Sunday, January 13, 2013

The Supreme Court hears argument Wednesday in Gunn v. Minton, concerning whether federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over state law malpractice claims where the underlying question involves patent law. This case has attracted far less attention than the other patent cases this Term, but it raises an important federal jurisdiction question, and the Court's opinion could have implications far outside patent malpractice cases—especially because the Court has held that the patent-related statute at issue, 28 U.S.C. § 1338(a) (giving the federal courts exclusive jurisdiction over "any civil action arising under any Act of Congress relating to patents"), should be interpreted in the same way as § 1331 (the source of federal question jurisdiction for actions "arising under" federal laws).

Thursday, January 3, 2013

I just posted The Google Shortcut to Trademark Law on SSRN, which I presented last month at a workshop on empirical trademark studies at Oxford (summary from IPKat here), and which I will present next month at WIPIP. In short, I argue that Google and other online search results are highly probative in offline trademark disputes, particularly for evaluating the strength of a trademark. Comments are very welcome!